The 6 best towns you can reach by train within an hour of Trento

1. Caldes

Best for a small town. 1,111 people live here.

53 min from Trento · homes €1,200 to €1,400 a m² in the center · 1,111 people

Why visit Caldes

The commune sits at around 700 meters in the lower valley, along the river, thirty-five kilometers northwest of Trento and below the southern ridge of the Brenta Dolomites. It is a scattered municipality of six hamlets: the village itself, Samoclevo, San Giacomo, Cassana, Tozzaga, Bordiana and Bozzana, strung along the slope between 635 and 767 meters, each holding its own cluster of stone houses on the same grade above the river.

The castle at the center of the arrangement was built between 1230 and 1235 by Rambaldo and Arnoldo da Cagnò as a five-storey tower-house, controlling commercial traffic up the valley together with the higher fortification above Samoclevo. It passed to a noble family in 1464, who rebuilt it into the form it holds now, and it belongs today to the autonomous province of Trento as a museum venue.

What emerges is a settlement pattern of small hamlets set at deliberate intervals along a single slope, held together historically by one river route and one controlling tower, and preserved since as a recognized example of that rural arrangement.

The catch: January nights average 3 degrees below zero.

What to see in Caldes

• Castel Caldes. Five-storey tower-house begun in 1230 and rebuilt by the Thun family from 1464, with sixteenth-century painted rooms and coats of arms, now a Buonconsiglio museum venue.
• Borgo di Caldes. Stone-built historic center below the castle, member of I Borghi più belli d'Italia for the preservation of its rural architecture and lanes.
• Samoclevo. Upper hamlet at 767 meters above Caldes, paired in the medieval period with the Rocca di Samoclevo to control traffic on the Val di Sole road.

How to get to Caldes

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 53 min away by road.

Everything we know about Caldes

2. Borgo Valsugana

Best for a walk through the old town. It is on the list of Italy's most beautiful villages.

49 min from Trento · homes €1,500 to €1,900 a m² in the center · 7,147 people

Why visit Borgo Valsugana

Borgo Valsugana sits at 380 meters on the Brenta, thirty kilometers east of Trento, in the lower part of the Valsugana valley that carries the road and the railway between Trento and the Veneto plain. The Roman settlement of Ausugum stood on the same site, on the Claudia Augusta Altinate road from Altino to Tridentum, which set the town on a route between the plain and the mountains long before the present center took shape.

The centro storico straddles the Brenta, arcades opening onto the quays on each bank, which is why locals and visitor guides call it the Little Venice of Trentino. The castle above the town looks down on this river center, and the side valley to the west holds the art project among the meadows, so the town reads in three layers: the water level where the old houses face each other across the river, the height of the watchtower on the hill, and the separate, quieter valley given over to the works in natural materials.

The valley was the front line in 1915 to 1916 and much of the historic center was rebuilt after the war, so the painted facades standing over the water today are largely a twentieth-century reconstruction of a much older river town.

What to see in Borgo Valsugana

• Castel Telvana. Medieval castle on Mount Ciolino above the town, built around a square watchtower five meters per side and twenty-six meters high.
• Ponte Veneziano. Fifteenth-century bridge over the Brenta crowned by two aedicules with graffiti inspired by seventeenth-century works of Jacopo Fiorentini.
• Arte Sella. Open-air contemporary art project in the Val di Sella since 1986, with works in natural materials around Malga Costa, including the Cattedrale Vegetale.

How to get to Borgo Valsugana

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 49 min away by road.

Everything we know about Borgo Valsugana

3. Levico Terme

Best for a swim. The comune's beach holds a Blue Flag.

30 min from Trento · homes €1,900 to €2,300 a m² in the center · 8,297 people

Why visit Levico Terme

Levico Terme sits at 520 meters in the Valsugana, twenty kilometers east of Trento, between the Lagorai chain and the high plateaus of Folgaria and Lavarone. The settlement later passed under Habsburg rule and was elevated to city rank in 1894 by decree of Franz Joseph I.

The spa quarter, the park and the lake sit close together at the edge of the old center, with the fort watching all three from the hill above. The historic center, with its imperial-era villas and the parish church of Santissimo Redentore, grew up around the spa rather than the other way round: the streets follow the shape of a resort built in the space of a few decades under Austro-Hungarian rule, rather than a town that predates it.

What survives is a place whose entire layout, from park gate to lakeshore to the fort on the ridge, still reads as the imperial spa it was built to be.

What to see in Levico Terme

• Parco delle Terme. Grounds laid out by Georg Ziehl around the spa buildings and the hotel, with paths shaded by mature planting where the Christmas market sets up each winter.
• Grand Hotel Imperial. Art Nouveau facade facing the park it anchors, still a working hotel after a renovation that kept its original style.
• Terme di Levico. The spa buildings that gave the town its purpose, drawing on water piped down from the mountain springs and still run as a treatment center today.

How to get to Levico Terme

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 30 min away by road.

Everything we know about Levico Terme

4. Rovereto

Best for a wine weekend. It belongs to the national association of wine towns.

31 min from Trento · homes €1,800 to €2,700 a m² in the center · 40,263 people

Why visit Rovereto

Rovereto sits at 204 meters in the Vallagarina, about 25 kilometers south of Trento and 70 north of Verona along the Adige. The castle rises on a rocky spur above the Leno torrent, built by the Castelbarco, strengthened by the Venetians from 1416 with three great artillery towers, and handed to the Habsburgs in 1509 after the Venetian defeat at Agnadello.

That handover is the hinge of the town's layout: the porticoed streets of the centro storico still carry Venetian facades alongside Habsburg ones, running from Piazza Rosmini to the castle walls, with the Borgo Sacco quarter and the old silk-trade palazzi marking where the town's merchant wealth once sat. Above the center, on the hill of Miravalle, the war made its own monument, cast from the bronze of cannons gathered from both sides of a conflict that had run through these mountains.

Depero, who lived and worked in Rovereto, gave the town a second, later claim, and the museum built around his work in 2002 sits inside a domed building at the opposite end of the town's story from the castle: one structure built for defence and passed between powers, the other built for a single collection and opened once, in peacetime. Between the fortress, the bell, and the museum, the town reads as a place shaped twice by the same war, first as ground fought over, later as ground that chose to remember it.

What to see in Rovereto

• Castello di Rovereto. Rises on its rock above the Leno torrent and Piazza Podestà, its three Venetian artillery towers, Marino, Malipiero and Coltrino, standing beside the additions made after the handover to Austria.
• MART. The circular building by Mario Botta centers on a glass-and-steel dome over the entrance plaza. Inside, the permanent collection runs from Depero through Morandi, de Chirico and Carrà.
• Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra. Inside the castle, the collection of uniforms, trench artefacts, prints and personal testimonies tells the war from the Italian-Austrian front, the fighting that ran through the mountains around the town.

How to get to Rovereto

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 31 min away by road.

Everything we know about Rovereto

5. Meran

Best for a soak. The comune has thermal baths.

1 h from Trento · homes €3,200 to €4,700 a m² in the center · 41,498 people

Why visit Meran

Merano sits at 324 meters in the basin where the Passer river meets the Adige, at the entrance to the Passeier and Vinschgau valleys, with mountains rising to 3,335 meters around it. The town was the capital of the County of Tyrol from the thirteenth century until 1420, when the Habsburgs moved the residence to Innsbruck.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria began wintering here in 1870 for the climate and the mild basin air; her stays turned Merano into a late-Habsburg spa destination, drawing Kafka, Rilke and Richard Strauss. The Kurhaus, an Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, and Castel Trauttmansdorff, where Sissi stayed and which now holds twelve hectares of botanical gardens and the Touriseum, anchor the imperial layer of the city.

Merano was annexed to Italy in 1919 under the Treaty of Saint-Germain. The bilingual city today is the center of South Tyrolean wine and apple farming, host of the Merano WineFestival each November at the Kurhaus.

What to see in Meran

• Giardini di Castel Trauttmansdorff. Twelve hectares of botanical gardens around the castle where Empress Elisabeth wintered, with eighty landscapes over a hundred-metre slope and the Touriseum tourism museum.
• Kurhaus. Art Nouveau pavilion on the Passer promenade, the spa-town centrepiece of nineteenth-century Merano and venue of the Merano WineFestival each November.
• Passeggiata Lungo Passirio. Spa promenade along the Passer river through the center of the city, lined with palms, flowers and the Wandelhalle, the covered Art Nouveau walking gallery.

How to get to Meran

It has its own railway station. Trento is about 1 h away by road.

Everything we know about Meran

6. Trento

Best for a ski week. There is a mapped ski area in the comune.

homes €2,200 to €3,600 a m² in the center · 118,640 people

Why visit Trento

Trento sits at 194 meters on the Adige, the city Italy chose as the seat of one of its two northern autonomous provinces and the regional capital of Trentino-Alto Adige. Monte Bondone rises to two thousand meters directly above the western edge; the Brenta Dolomites are an hour west.

Between 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent met here in twenty-five sessions across the Duomo di San Vigilio and the Castello del Buonconsiglio, formulating the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation and shaping the next four centuries of European Christianity. The Duomo, begun in 1212 on the foundations of a late-Roman basilica, still stands at the center of Piazza Duomo.

The Buonconsiglio, built 1239 to 1255 as the residence of the prince-bishops, is now the city's main museum. In 2013 Renzo Piano completed MUSE, the natural science museum on the south edge of town, with a six-storey jagged roofline that imitates the Dolomites.

What to see in Trento

• Castello del Buonconsiglio. Thirteenth-century residence of the prince-bishops of Trento, host to sessions of the Council of Trent and now the city's main museum, with Gothic frescoes in the Torre Aquila.
• Duomo di San Vigilio. Romanesque-Gothic cathedral begun in 1212 on the remains of a late-Roman basilica, where most public sessions of the Council of Trent were held between 1545 and 1563.
• MUSE. Museum of natural science by Renzo Piano, opened 2013, with a 130-meter roofline that rises and falls in imitation of the Dolomites visible to the east.

How to get to Trento

It has its own railway station.

Everything we know about Trento